1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to a web-based application for putting together photos and words with styled templates that can be customized by an author for the purpose of telling a story.
2. Background of the Related Art
Online sharing of digital photos is well-known in the prior art. In particular, commercial web sites (such as Ofoto, Shutterfly, Flickr and many others) offer end users the ability to upload and store digital photos and to secure those photos, e.g., using standard logon and/or password schemes. It is also well-known in the art to provide hosted services (such as Six Apart) that enable end users to publish their own web logs (blogs). Social networking sites (such as Friendster, MySpace, Facebook and others) combine photo sharing and blogging by providing tools and hosted services that enable end users to upload and store their digital photos, and to publish blogs in association with those photos. While current approaches provide some advantages, the prior art has not recognized that digital photos are often episodic in nature and, as such, they are best shared in the context of a story. The prior art does not provide adequate tools or services to enable end users to upload and composite their photos with text in a storybook (or scrapbook) manner. In addition, prior solutions do not afford multiple end users, each of whom may have captured some relevant aspect of a shared experience, to share their photos on a collaborative canvas.
There remains a need in the art to provide an easy-to-use, secure, scalable and highly available online application that enables end users to publish their photos and words in custom stories that can be accessed, shared and re-published.
The present invention solves this need.